The List of YouTube Sponsors: 60 Brands, Who They Pay, and Who Takes Small Channels

The short answer

The YouTube sponsors starter pack (any channel size)

If you are starting from zero, these are the programs that pay on performance, so they do not care how many subscribers you have. Sign up, drop your links, and earn per sale or sign-up while you build toward flat-fee deals.

This is the “free sponsors” layer: no cost to join, no minimum size. The full filterable list is next.

The full list of YouTube sponsors, filterable

Search a brand or product, filter by category, or tick Small channels only to hide the brands that need scale. “Pay model” tells you how the money works: affiliate deals pay per result, flat fees pay a set amount, hybrid deals mix both, and product deals send goods plus a smaller fee. “How to reach” is your fastest route in.

Channel-size and pay columns describe how each program generally works, not a locked offer. For exact dollar figures by niche and subscriber count, read the YouTube sponsorship rates report.

What the list shows

YouTube sponsors for small channels

Flat-fee brand deals want scale, so a small channel gets passed over for those. Two other layers stay open at any size. First, the open affiliate programs above pay on results and take any size. Second, product-led and performance brands (HelloFresh, Audible, Skillshare, Surfshark, Manscaped, Displate) work with channels from about 10K, because their deals are tied to a promo code, not a headline audience number.

Below 25K subscribers, reverse outreach works best. Find the emerging sponsors that already pay channels your size, then pitch them before they build a full roster. If you are in the 1K to 10K range, our nano-influencer sponsorship rates guide has the rate benchmarks, and how to get YouTube sponsorships has the pitch.

How much do YouTube sponsors pay?

A typical integrated sponsor segment pays roughly $10 to $50 for every 1,000 views the video earns, and finance, business, and tech channels sit at the top of that range because their audiences convert into customers. Affiliate deals pay differently: you earn per sale or sign-up, often $5 to $25 each, with no ceiling if the video keeps getting views. Product deals pay in goods plus a smaller fee.

To turn that into a number you can quote, price off your average views, not your subscriber count. The exact rate cards by niche, subscriber tier, and CPM (the ad price advertisers pay per 1,000 views), including what to charge and how to counter a lowball, are in the YouTube sponsorship rates report. Sponsorships are also one of several income streams; the monetization strategies pillar covers the full stack.

How to get sponsors on YouTube, in four steps

1. Copy your competitors' sponsor list. Pick 10 to 20 channels just above your size and note every brand they have taken money from in the last few months. A brand that paid three of your competitors has an open budget for your exact audience. Doing this at scale is what Competitor Studio Sponsor Intelligence is for.
2. Start with the open programs. Join the affiliate programs from the starter pack today so you have links running while you pitch. This also gives you conversion data to show a brand later.
3. Pitch the emerging sponsors, not just the giants. The brands that appear once or twice across your competitors have budget but no full roster, so a cold email actually lands. Send your best video, your audience snapshot, and one specific integration idea.
4. Use a platform to fill the gaps. When you want inbound offers, list on a sponsorship marketplace. Our review of sponsorship platforms and agencies ranks the ones worth your time, and the complete sponsorships guide covers contracts, FTC disclosure, and payment terms.

How to find out who sponsors a specific creator

People search this by name all the time, wanting to know who sponsors a particular creator. A named list goes stale within weeks, because sponsors rotate every video. Use this method instead. It takes two minutes per channel and stays current.

1. Open the creator's five most recent videos and read the description and pinned comment for promo codes and tracked links. That is where the current sponsor almost always sits.
2. Watch the first two minutes and the mid-roll for the spoken sponsor read. The brand named there is this month's deal.
3. To cover a whole niche at once instead of one channel, run a Sponsor Intelligence pass across a cohort. It scans months of uploads and counts every sponsor mention, so you see who pays whom, ranked.

Use the same steps for any creator you are researching. It beats a static list because it is always current, and it shows you the brands actually spending in your niche right now.

Potential sponsors for AI YouTube channels

AI startups are spending hard on creator sponsorships right now, and they want the exact audience an AI channel has. The most active AI-niche sponsors in 2026 are Recall, Higgsfield AI, Zapier, HubSpot, Sunsama, Descript, and Granola, with dev-facing AI tools like Cursor and Warp bidding hard for coding channels.

AI startups run deals creator-direct and move fast, so a small AI channel with a clear demo can land a paid integration that a legacy SaaS brand would never offer at that size. Pitch the tool you actually use, and show it solving a real problem on screen. For the niche-by-niche frequency data behind these names, see the AI section of our most common sponsors report.

Frequently asked questions

How this list was built, and its limits

The brands. The list is drawn from OutlierKit Competitor Studio Sponsor Intelligence pulls, which read the sponsor mentions across a niche's channels and count them, run across the main creator niches. It is the same source behind our most common sponsors report, plus the evergreen cross-niche programs every creator eventually sees. This is a working shortlist of brands with active YouTube budgets, not a census of every company that has sponsored a video.

The columns. Channel-size and pay-model columns describe how each program generally works, based on how these brands buy, not a guaranteed offer to you. “Small channels” means realistically reachable under about 25K subscribers; open affiliate programs are marked as any size because they genuinely have no minimum. Exact dollar rates are deliberately left to the rates report. One fixed number per brand would be wrong for most channels that read it.

Limits. Sponsor budgets rotate, and a brand that buys heavily one quarter can go quiet the next. PayPal Honey is the clearest example: once the most prolific sponsor on YouTube, its spend dropped after a 2024 controversy, so an old Honey deal is a weak signal today. Always confirm a brand is still active by checking recent videos in your niche before you pitch. And watch for scams: if an offer arrives in your inbox unprompted, run it through our checklist on how to spot a fake sponsorship first.

This is part of the OutlierKit research reports series. The word “sponsor” treats 60 very different brands as one thing, which is why the columns above matter more than the list. The subscriber benchmarks report breaks down channel size the same way, and the RPM benchmarks report does it for pay.